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Modeselektor’s “Shipwreck”

Can you read the name “Modeselektor” without yelling “SELECTAH!!” in your brain? I really can’t. Maybe I spent too many of my teenage years listening to Meat Beat Manifesto’s Subliminal Sandwich (specifically, the second track from the album “Nuclear Bomb”), but I always yell SELECTAH!!! in my head. Every single time.

So, when I saw this video posted earlier today, I was all ah, modeSELECTAH!!! and Thom Yorke, that’s pretty neat. I like Modeselektor (Modeskeletor???). The track is a nice piece of minor key tech house with Thom Yorke’s unmistakable vocals singing words that could easily be mistaken for other words. Ironic. But it’s nice and the bass is thick and a smidge wobbly, suggesting dubstep without any of the genre’s trappings. I quite like it.

The video, violent and dark yet muted, matches the song perfectly. The story of a little boy collecting batteries in some sort of post-zombie-apocalypse England may not have anything to do with what Thom Yorke is singing about (not that I can decipher what he’s singing about), but the tonality is a perfect fit. It’s interesting to see the classic zombie tropes presented more artfully, more abstractly, against a soundtrack that you would never associate with a horror film. It’s like a short, dreamy, slow-motion, art zombie film. It’s great.

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